Fate Brewing Co. ready to open in Boulder – but will it keep that name?

[media-credit name=”provided by Fate Brewing[2] ” align=”alignright” width=”270″][/media-credit] Fate Brewing[2] occupies a huge space that was the longtime home of a Mexican restaurant.

Almost all the ingredients are in place for Boulder’s soon-to-open Fate Brewing Co.: an owner with a solid track record at a craft beer-centric pub, an experienced brewer with medals to his credit, a successful round of fundraising[3] and a stylishly renovated large space in a good location.

What owner Mike Lawinski did not anticipate was another brewery opening in Arizona with the same name.

The proprietors of the two Fate Brewing Cos. say they started developing their ideas about the same time and didn’t discover their conundrum until about eight-and-a-half months later.

“We are spending a lot of brain cells to figure this one out,” Lawinski said. “There is no guarantee on any solution, but we’re doing everything we can to just not fight it out.”

For now, Boulder’s Fate Brewing is focusing on a more immediate concern – getting ready for its opening on Monday. New brewery openings so far this year have tended toward the tap room model[5] or the neighborhood nanobrewery[6]. Fate is going all-in with a high-end comfort-food restaurant with a healthy Boulder twist and a beer menu featuring both its own creations and a healthy guest list.

Lawinski formerly worked for Big Red F Restaurant Group running the West End Tavern[8] for eight years and working as operations manager at Centro Latin Kitchen for the last two. While in those roles, he started talking with brewer Jeff Griffith of Golden City Brewing[9] about teaming up on a project.

When a 7,000-square-foot space that formerly held a Jose Muldoon’s restaurant became available at 1600 38th Street on Boulder’s eastside, Lawinski had found his location. The floor plan proved ideal for a 10-barrel brewhouse capable of 2,400 barrels a year.

The 30 draft lines at Fate eventually will include 10 to 15 Fate beers, with the rest from other breweries. Fate’s regular lineup will be a combination of staples and the unusual: an IPA, an American-style stout that is one of Griffith’s specialties, a Belgian-style pale ale, German-style kolsch and a Roggenbier, which Lawinski described as a dunkel weiss using rye grain instead of wheat.

Lawinski said collaborations will remain part of the rotation, and starting with them makes sense given the vision always was to pour other beers alongside Fate’s. Other Colorado brewers are thinking similarly – at least among those with a brewpub license, a requisite for serving other people’s beers.

“Personally, I think I have a great brewer and we’ll make some fantastic beer,” Lawinski said. “But I think the beer industry is so vast and innovative, we’d almost be naive to think we were the only type of beer that would be offered. I took the approach of celebrating craft beer.”

Lawinski said Fate aspires to bring the craft brewing attitude to all aspects of the business, to the way staff treats customers to locally sourced food and spirits from small local distilleries.

Fate will offer “craveable, innovative comfort food” built around smaller shared plates, Lawinski. There will be fried food and carbs, but also a nod to the healthy: glazed carrots, butter snap pea with bacon jalapeno marmalade and carmelized sweet potatoes with goat cheese and arugula.

The fate of the Fate name is yet to be determined.

Fate Brewing Co. of Scottsdale, Ariz., opened in September as a seven-barrel brewery and pub specializing in small-batch beer and wood-fired pizza. Owner Steve McFate has a Colorado connection: He enrolled in the famed brewery startup course at Colorado Boy Brewery and Pub in Ridgway about two years ago, befriended owners Tom and Sandy Hennessy and spent about a year brewing on their system, he said.

Lawinski and McFate met last summer and since then have been trying to find a way forward. It is unclear whether the breweries can coexist with the exact same name without causing confusion. Vendors already have mixed the two up, and Vail’s Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Festival earlier this month mistook the Boulder brewery for the Arizona one, causing a marker to be taken to a sign.

“It’s becoming a very crowded market in terms of names,” McFate said. “In the spirit of craft beer in general, we’re both trying to determine a way that we can work together without too much consumer confusion. We do have different concepts. We share the same name but differentiate our products. We have not solved the issue, but I think we both have high hopes we’ll be able to accomplish that.”

Lawinski said the two are discussing several options, which he declined to discuss. On an optimistic note, he added that the craft beer business generally “is more fraternal than it is cutthroat.”